Security of Java takes a dangerous turn for the worse, experts say (ars technica)

Posted Sep 21, 2013 7:27 UTC (Sat) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375)
In reply to: Security of Java takes a dangerous turn for the worse, experts say (ars technica) by peter-b
Parent article: Security of Java takes a dangerous turn for the worse, experts say (ars technica)

Of course it's not literally impossible to implement full tail-call optimization on the JVM - it's just harder. Kawa has long done so. It uses a special calling convention, using a thread-specific CallContext object. This calling convention is optional, because it is slower, and doesn't interoperate with "native" Java as directly - you enable it using an optional --full-tailcalls flag. (Note you can mix code compiled with --full-tailcalls and --no-full-tailcalls.) (Also note that Kawa even with full tailcalls enabled is still generally faster than Clojure.)